Today, for the majority of younger jazz fans/jazz students/musicians, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond is gone (he died in 1977) and almost certainly forgotten. It's a shame. The possessor of an original tone and a highly refined melodic approach to improvisation (as opposed to a pattern-based one), he came to international recognition in the 1950s and 1960s as a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. In an interview, Brubeck told me he considered Desmond's best improvising on record was to be found on his quartet's recordings of Jazz at the College of the Pacific (both volumes) and Dave Brubeck Quartet Jazz at Oberlin, to which I would add The Dave Brubeck Quartet At Carnegie Hall. One of the reasons younger jazz students/musicians will probably not have encountered him is because melodic improvisation poses a bit of a problem for jazz educators, as former teacher, director of curriculum, and vice president at Berklee College of Music and doyen of jazz educators, Gary Burton told me in interview: ‘I have to honestly say most teachers of jazz and improvisation probably don't talk about [melodic development] much because they they are not sure of it themselves’. Glad to be Unhappy certainly does not show Desmond's consummate skill in manipulating and building a line to best advantage, or any advantage at all since it's jazz influenced mood music. In the 1940s arranger Paul Weston began making recordings of what he called ‘Mood Music’, initially for Capitol and from 1950 for Columbia – he even recorded an album called Mood Music in 1953 along with titles like Dream Time and Music for a Rainy Night. It was a concept that proved hugely popular with the public, with Jackie Gleason on the Capitol label probably the most popular in the genre with albums such as Music to Make You Misty, Music For Lovers Only and Music, Martinis and Memories. Desmond's Glad to be Unhappy – one of a series of five he recorded for RCA Victor in the 1960s – was intended to plug into this market and as the original liner notes for Glad to be Unhappy state quite unequivocally, these are “Torch Songs Sung by Sax”, that “create a carpet on which one can float and reflect”. Thus we get a pretty straight statement of the melody and light variations thereof since Mood Music albums were intended for passive, rather than active listening and were what the composer Eric Satie called ‘Furniture Music’ – music that provides an undemanding ambience. It's the sort of thing that's ideal as background music for a dinner party or making love. It's not really meant to be listened to per se, but simply fill the spaces around us with nice sounds as we relax in an airport lounge, get into a lift or walk though a shopping mall.